By Richard Warnica, Staff Reporter
March 2, 2025
The secret to Doug Ford’s remarkable success in Ontario politics was parked outside the Toronto Congress Centre on Thursday night. It was blocking off about six spaces — a giant moving billboard-cum-campaign-bus plastered with Ford’s smiling, hard-hatted head next to the balloon-letter words: PROTECT ONTARIO.
The Progressive Conservatives won a third consecutive majority government this week. And no matter what you think of Ford as a person or policymaker, that’s an astonishing political achievement, especially for a man long dismissed as less likable and a worse politician than his own brother Rob, who famously smoked crack on camera, twice, as mayor.
Doug Ford won, again, by keeping it simple. His campaign team understood something about politics in 2025 that few others seem to: the only thing that matters anymore is brand.
I was at Ford’s victory party on election night. Before the polls closed, I asked a long-time Liberal who was there doing media what he thought of the race.
News coverage, he told me, doesn’t move the needle for most voters anymore. Social media, surprisingly, doesn’t either; most people online are too trapped in their own bubbles to shift how they vote.
All that counts now is a kind of high-level marketing. Think of it as a post-narrative, almost post-literate, politics. It’s not just about delivering a simple message. It’s about being a simple man who stands for one or two simple things: PROTECT ONTARIO, say. Or, as the blue hats Ford volunteers were handing out to the crowd Thursday night said: CANADA IS NOT FOR SALE.
Politically, it works, clearly. But the problem for Ford, and increasingly for Ontario, is that while winning an election may be simple, running a government isn’t. It is, in fact, very complicated. You can’t fix primary care with a slogan. Branding won’t help you solve the funding crisis in our schools. A hard-hat and a handshake look great on a bus, sure, but they aren’t doing much to open the Eglinton Crosstown LRT.
There is a simple reason, beyond the obvious (politicians get tired, voters get bored) why most governments don’t last more than a couple of terms. It is really hard to engage in the actual problems of governance without making some people, often a lot of people, mad.
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